It’s a pretty good bet that Jason Kenney is going to be the next premier of Alberta. According to the CBC’s official poll tracker, there is a 99 per cent chance Kenney’s United Conservative Party will win the most seats on April 16.

Below, a few reasons why the UCP can be uniquely braggadocious about their prospect of victory — and how they could still manage to lose this thing anyway.

The United Conservative Party has been leading the polls for its entire existence

In July 2017, a week after the party was created, it opened a lead of 28 points over the incumbent NDP. There hasn’t been a single poll since that didn’t show the UCP with a commanding lead over the NDP. The typical Canadian election campaign is a horse race between two parties who each command about 40 per cent of the electorate. But the UCP has repeatedly been able to claim the rare prize of seeing more than half the electorate saying they’ll vote for them. When the election campaign started, they had an explosive lead of 56 per cent versus the NDP’s 31 per cent. That lead has narrowed somewhat as the campaign has ground on, but the fact remains that throughout its entire time in government, the NDP has never once polled as the province’s most popular party. The sole exception was in November, 2015, when the party’s support of 33 per cent was just enough to pull it ahead of the still-divided Wildrose and Progressive Conservatives.

Rachel Notley pictured only five years ago, when she was announcing her candidacy for the leadership of what was then an obscure fourth place political party.Christina Ryan/Calgary Herald

Under proportional representation, the NDP would have never formed government

New Democrats are usually big fans of proportional representation. In B.C., Premier John Horgan’s NDP government recently held a failed referendum to abolish first-past-the-post. When Doug Ford won the Ontario election last year, the NDP-aligned Broadbent Institute blamed it on a “major fault in our electoral system.” But in Alberta, there never would have been a premier Rachel Notley with proportional representation; the combined Alberta conservative vote has always been higher than support for the NDP. In the 2015 election, the NDP cruised to power with only 40.57 per cent of the vote, as compared to 52 per cent won by a combination of the votes logged by Wildrose and the Progressive Conservatives. In one of the more extreme cases, Red Deer NDP candidate Kim Schreiner got into the legislature with only 29.4 per cent of the vote, with the rest of the riding’s votes divided relatively evenly between the Wildrose, PC and Liberal candidates. Without a divided right this time around, the choice is a bit more binary.

It’s unlikely the NDP can maintain their majority, but it’s feasible

Despite what the polls say, the Alberta election isn’t a simple numbers game. The Alberta NDP don’t need to win the popular vote, they just need to hang onto 44 seats, however narrowly. To do this, the NDP’s only hope is to hold onto urban Alberta, even as they are washed out in the hinterlands. If the party held onto all their Edmonton-area ridings (24), all their Calgary ridings (15) and then a smattering of ridings in Lethbridge, Medicine Hat and Banff, they would just be able to eke out a majority. But Alberta has never really been a place where parties can hold power merely by dominating the cities. Of the province’s 4.3 million people, fewer than half live in Edmonton and Calgary. This is in sharp contrast to a province like Manitoba, where parties can effectively win elections merely by capturing Winnipeg.

Population density map of Canada. Note how Alberta, unlike most of Canada, has filled its countryside with people.Statistics Canada

It’s not unprecedented to lose a 20-point lead

As of press time, the UCP are leading the NDP by a considerable lead of more than 13 points. However, in Canada it’s not at all unprecedented that a provincial party has squandered this kind of lead before voting day. The most recent example comes out of B.C. For more than a year leading up to the 2013 provincial election, the NDP was leading the B.C. Liberals by as much as 20 points. “If this man kicked a dog, he’d still win the election,” was the infamous headline in The Province referring to NDP leader Adrian Dix. When voting day came, however, the NDP not only failed to form government, but they lost seats. And it’s not just NDPers who can squander a lead. A year before the 2011 Manitoba election, the province’s Progressive Conservatives were leading Greg Selinger’s incumbent NDP by more than 15 points. By the time ballots were counted, the PC’s seat share hadn’t budged.

It was Postmedia’s ‘Dewey defeats Truman’ moment.Postmedia File

Polling is a bastard

In the leadup to Alberta’s 2012 election, it was generally taken as fact that Wildrose was going to defeat Alison Redford’s Progressive Conservatives. In one poll only two days before Election Day, Wildrose was predicted to be headed for a “sweeping majority.” Instead, they captured only 17 of 87 legislative seats. One of the problems is that pollsters are still having trouble adjusting to the cell phone age. Many polls rely on people with landlines who don’t immediately hang up when encountering an unfamiliar voice; a demographic that disproportionately captures older folks, whose votes generally skew conservative. In addition, many Alberta ridings contain high populations of transients and new immigrants who are easily missed by polling. Despite Alberta’s not-great economic situation, the province is still a net recipient of newcomers. Since 2015, another 150,000 people have packed into Wild Rose Country; more than enough to swing some key ridings.

Former Wildrose leader Danielle Smith pictured soon after losing her nomination as a Progressive Conservative candidate in 2015. Smith presumably has some strong feelings about being too confident of victory.Jordan Verlage/The Canadian Press

The UCP hasn’t been scandal free, but nobody seems to care

Less than two weeks into the election campaign, it emerged that the UCP was under RCMP questioning due to Kenney allegedly running a fake leadership candidate in 2017 in order to sink the chances of rival Brian Jean. Two UCP candidates have been criticized for past anti-gay comments. The NDP has also been hammering hard on Kenney’s own lengthy record as a social conservative. Do a Google search for “Jason Kenney” in Alberta right now, and the top hit is a promoted tweet from the NDP linking to a website framing Kenney as an inveterate gay-basher. “Did you know Jason Kenney has forcefully campaigned against basic rights and protections for LGBTQ Canadians?” it reads. But a lot of this stuff has been public record for years. As a member of the Conservative opposition in 2005, it was Kenney who delivered one of the lengthiest House of Commons speeches opposing gay marriage. When Kenney was running for leadership of the Progressive Conservatives in 2016, red Tories within the party had similarly taken pause at his social conservative pedigree. However, while all this Kenney-bashing may drive Notley’s own base to the polls, it may not have a noticeable effect in a campaign where the chief worries are economic. More than 87 per cent of Albertans see it as a “crisis” that pipelines keep getting stonewalled, and most do not see the NDP as the best pick to get them build. Albertans didn’t care about Notley’s past as an oil industry critic when they made her premier, and they may not care about Kenney’s past as a social conservative should they choose him as Notley’s successor.

Sometimes, the Alberta electorate can be a tad unpredictable

In the 2012 election, the Alberta NDP finished in fourth place, winning only two seats. Three years later, the party won a majority government. “Never underestimate how FUBAR (f—ed up beyond all recognition) the Alberta electorate can be,” said an Alberta pollster who did not wish to be named for this story. One of the swing factors in the 2015 election was that, for the first since Jurassic Park was in theatres, Alberta lefties saw a feasible chance at power and showed up in droves. Turnout for 2015 was 57 per cent — the highest since 1993 (which itself was a surprisingly close race between Ralph Klein’s Progressive Conservatives and the Alberta Liberals). Turnout could similarly deal some surprises on April 16 if progressives turn out in droves while complacent conservatives stay home. This is why, even with near-certain victory in their grasp, Alberta conservatives are being unusually careful about not screwing it up before election day. When rumours abounded that former Wildrose leader Brian Jean might join the Freedom Conservative Party of Alberta, a parade of Tory elders (including former prime minister Stephen Harper) emerged to denounce him as a vote-splitter. Kenney’s one-time boss, the former Canadian Alliance leader Stockwell Day, warned that the UCP will still have to “earn every inch of ground they take.” “Jason Kenney, of all people, knows that in politics complacency is fatal and nothing can be taken for granted,” he told the National Post by email.

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